The particularities of contemporary archaeology

Jean-Pierre Legendre is an archaeologist with the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Regional Archaeology Department. For several decades now, he has been excavating and documenting the material remains of contemporary conflicts. He has published a book on the German prison camp at Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, and in recent years has taken an interest in the memorial reception of the Rivesaltes internee camp in the south of France.

Nicolas Offenstadt is a historian, professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His work on the memories of the First World War and the former GDR has led him to take an interest in material remains and to collaborate with archaeologists from contemporary periods.

Samuel Verdan is a specialist in Greek archaeology. He is involved in the research carried out by the Swiss Archaeological School in Greece on the sites of Eretria and Amarynthos. In 2019, as part of a collaboration between the EPFL and the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva, he supervised a team of students working on a Gulag camp in the Far North of Siberia.

Juliette Brangé is a doctoral student at the University of Strasbourg and at Archéologie Alsace. She is interested in the war economy in Nazi concentration camps. For the past four years, she has been leading archaeological digs in the quarry of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

Valentin Schneider is a historian and researcher specialising in the Second World War, the German occupation and wartime captivity. He works regularly with archaeologists in France and Greece, notably as part of excavations at the La Glacerie, Coyolles and Bétheny camps. He has incorporated the results of these excavations into his own work as a historian.

Thomas Kersting is a pioneer of contemporary archaeology in Germany. As deputy director of the Brandenburg State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archaeological State Museum, he has contributed to the institutionalisation of camp archaeology with regard to the camp sites of the Second World War. He also co-curated the travelling exhibition Ausgeschlossen, which deals with the archaeology of the Nazi camps in Brandenburg, and presented an introduction to the archaeology of the forced labour camps of the 20th century in the book Lagerland.